All together now

London can claim to be the most multicultural place in the world, its population drawn from every race, nation and religion on earth. But what about the rest of Britain? How many new immigrants move here, who are they and where do they settle? As a follow-up to last year's award-winning issue charting immigrant communities in the capital, Leo Benedictus set out on an even bigger task: to meet these populations across the whole country. The result, which ranges from the century-old population of Cardiff Somalis to the much newer Portuguese in Lincolnshire, is a snapshot of the extraordinary cultural richness of the UK today

This is Britain's second great age of immigration. It seems to be passing with much less fanfare than the first one. For the past decade, a wave of incomers has been sweeping across the country, scattering new cultures, languages and religions into almost every town and village. In 1997, a total of 63,000 work permit holders and their dependants came to Britain. In 2003, it was 119,000. Altogether, between 1991 and 2001, the UK population increased by 2.2 million, some 1.14 million of whom were born abroad. And all this was before EU enlargement in May 2004, which pulled in 130,000 more people from the new member states in its first year alone. The last time this country saw immigration on this scale, in the 1950s and 60s, there were white riots in the streets. Why are there none today?

Clearly Britain has mellowed somewhat since then. The first immigration age was a painful process, particularly for the immigrants themselves, but it helped give the country more of a taste for its second helping. In public life, at least, it is plainly no longer acceptable to dislike people simply for their foreignness. This is good and helpful, but it has left those who dislike the idea of immigration with little room for manoeuvre. Which is why the figure of the fraudulent asylum seeker spinning tales of woe so he can help himself to a piece of our economy - or even our benefits - has become such a popular target for the instinctive xenophobe. In some parts of Britain, the word "Kosovan" is now more likely to be shouted in the street than the word "Paki", even when the accused is Portuguese.

Asylum seekers and refugees (people who have been granted asylum) may also have served as a distraction from the general immigration boom. They certainly need more support from the state than migrant workers, and their numbers did indeed rise worldwide in the late 1990s. Nevertheless, they remain just a fraction of the immigration picture in Britain. In 2003, when the asylum panic was at its height, there were 1.4 million overseas workers in the UK and just 49,370 asylum seekers. Now, thanks to some extremely tough government love, the total seeking asylum is closer to 10,000.

But liberal attitudes and the asylum distraction are not the only things that make this second boom different from the first one. For a start, as the maps on the following pages show, immigration is no longer something that only happens in big cities. Most towns of any size now have at least one established community from overseas, and scarcely a corner of the country remains that has not been touched by the process, painting a pattern too complex and changeable to depict in detail. Researching this issue, we would often hear rumours of garden centres in Devon that were staffed entirely by Poles, or bands of itinerant Portuguese working on farms in the Scottish borders, but a map of all these micro-communities would simply be impossible to draw.

The immigrants themselves are also far more diverse now than they were in the 1950s. All the significant immigrant and immigrant descended communities in Britain, are still dominated by the traditional groups of Caribbeans, Chinese, south Asians and Irish. But the new arrivals of the past decade are as likely to come from Zimbabwe, eastern Europe, the Middle East or the Philippines.

The trends of the second immigration age may be clearest in London, but a separate story is also developing outside the capital, where it is now commonplace for employers to find staff through agencies that recruit abroad, often through the internet. This applies as much to large organisations such as the NHS, which has brought in many thousands of health professionals from overseas in the past decade, as it does to farmers in Norfolk or hotels in the Isles of Scilly.

The arrival of immigrants in smaller groups than before, and from a greater variety of places, is probably another reason why they have caused fewer shockwaves, and substantial improvements in legislation and policing have certainly helped. But the main root of our comparative harmony - the theme that emerged most strongly from the hundreds of interviews conducted for this issue - is that we have simply become more accepting of difference.

The great neglected truth of British multiculturalism is that every day, millions of different people across the country are actually getting along very nicely, while the bad news gets all the attention. Last year's Home Office figures show Cumbria to have the highest rate of racially aggravated incidents in England and Wales, with 6.2% of the county's non-white population reporting some form of racial abuse in 2004. Few people would be happy about this, and yet the other side of the picture is worth considering: 93.8% of non-white people living in Britain's most intolerant area were left in peace.

On many occasions, researching this issue, we asked people if they had had any problems with the locals. Sometimes they had, but far more frequently they hadn't, and said so with a look on their faces that seemed to ask, "Is that all you journalists want to know about?" Immigration is a subject, like air travel or life in Africa, that we only hear about when it is making someone miserable. This vastly inflates the extreme fringes of the immigrant experience, while the fact that most immigrants and their families just lead normal lives gets forgotten.

On the whole, Britain today is one of the most tolerant and multicultural societies there has ever been - in fact it is the country's multiculturalism that is making it more tolerant. The same Home Office figures show us that immigration is not the cause of racism; it is its cure. Racist incidents are diminishing fastest where immigrants and their families are most established, while it is the parts of Britain with least experience of immigration - the rural areas, on the whole - that are the most hostile.

The fact that reported incidents have risen substantially in Cumbria, Northumbria, Devon and Cornwall, most of Wales, Durham and Cleveland since 2001 reflects the fact that, because of this second immigration boom, many of the people who live there are rubbing shoulders with foreigners for the first time. It is a new experience, which some are not comfortable with. But they, or their children, will get used to it. When white Londoners found themselves living next to Afro-Caribbeans in the 1950s, they rioted in their thousands, but by 2004, less than 1% of London's 1.9m non-white people were reporting any racial abuse.

In time, integration and acceptance are inevitable. No matter how disadvantaged they were when they arrived, every community seems to settle and prosper in the end. The only variable is the speed at which this happens, and it is happening far more quickly than it used to.